Portrait of Virginia Stephen, 1902

George Charles Beresford (1864–1938), photographer

Virginia Stephen

London, 1902

Woolf was twenty years old when she, her father, and sister had their portraits taken by George Charles Beresford in July 1902. This was an unhappy time for the then-future writer: her mother had died in 1895, her half-sister Stella in 1897. Her older half-brother George was sexually abusing her, and she and her sister, Vanessa, were bearing the emotional strain of their father’s emotional distress at the loss of their mother. Nevertheless, Woolf was channeling energy into writing, and would launch her thirty-six-year career with the publication of her first reviews and essays in 1904.

Although she appears regularly in family snapshots, she generally disliked sitting for formal portraits.